Documentary channel · New stories every week
Medicine's darkest chapters. Then vs Now.
The dark history and modern science of the human face — written by an oral & maxillofacial surgeon. Real stories, real science, sources for every claim.
Latest episode · Wed 14 Oct
A Toothache Could Kill You
Five hundred years ago, a toothache sent you to the man who cut your hair — and the tooth could kill you. How barber-surgeons, fairground tooth-pullers, a soldier-surgeon who ran out of boiling oil, and one book from 1728 turned…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest episode · Wed 21 Oct
The Surgeon Who Rebuilt the Broken Faces of WWI
In the First World War, trench warfare left thousands of soldiers without faces. An ear, nose and throat surgeon from New Zealand, Harold Gillies, built a hospital just for faces — and laid the foundations of modern plastic and…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest episode · Wed 28 Oct
Your Jaw Is Broken
On the night Lincoln was shot, his Secretary of State lay in bed with a broken jaw — and a brace may have saved his life. From an Egyptian papyrus that called a broken jaw "an ailment not to be treated", to Hippocrates, the…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest episode · Wed 4 Nov
Guilty by a Bite? The Teeth That Testified
In 1776, a silversmith named Paul Revere identified a fallen friend by the false tooth he had wired into his mouth. Teeth went on to name a murder victim in 1849 Boston and the dead of a Paris fire in 1897 — then courts asked…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest · Medicine on Film · Sun 8 Nov
Anna Coleman Ladd: The Woman Who Made Copper Faces for WW1
In 1918 in Paris, American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd made copper masks for soldiers whose faces had been destroyed in the First World War: a plaster cast, a clay face, then a copper shell grown in an electric bath and painted…
Latest episode · Wed 11 Nov
Leonardo da Vinci and the Bone That Brought Down Galen
For more than a thousand years, medicine learned the human body from Galen, a Roman doctor who never dissected a human. Leonardo da Vinci drew the truth in secret notebooks. Andreas Vesalius cut the bodies himself and proved the…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest episode · Wed 18 Nov
George Washington's Teeth: They Weren't Wood
On the day he became the first president of the United States, George Washington had one tooth left. Everything else in his mouth was hippopotamus ivory, wire, springs — and teeth that once belonged to someone else. Not one…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest episode · Wed 25 Nov
Why a Dentist Pulled His Own Tooth on Laughing Gas
Hartford, 1844: at a laughing-gas stage show, a volunteer gashes his leg and feels nothing. A young dentist in the audience notices — and the next day he has one of his own wisdom teeth pulled under the gas. Why did his big…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Latest episode · Wed 2 Dec
They Pushed Needles Into Dead Faces to Find Bach
Leipzig, 1894: workmen dig up an oak coffin that might hold Johann Sebastian Bach. To test the skull, the anatomist Wilhelm His pushes fine needles into the faces of the dead to measure how thick a face really is, and a sculptor…
Test yourself: free 10-question quiz on this episode at AxonQuiz.com, our sister study app.
Our signature
In Then vs Now, every story ends with what a surgeon would do today.
We start in the archive — engravings, court records, war-hospital files — and finish in a modern operating room. Same face, two centuries apart.
Then: Henry Vandyke Carter, Gray's Anatomy (1858), public domain. Now: 3D render made for the channel.
The series
All series →
Series 01 · 4 episodes
Then vs NowThe weekly documentary.
The flagship series: one dark chapter from the history of the face, jaw, skull and teeth, and what a surgeon would do about it today.
Series 02 · 1 episode
Medicine on FilmHistory caught on camera.
Medical history told through real archive film: the people, the hospitals and the inventions the cameras actually recorded.The case files
All episodes →
Premieres Sun 8 Nov
Anna Coleman Ladd: The Woman Who Made Copper Faces for WW1
Premieres Wed 4 Nov
Guilty by a Bite? The Teeth That Testified
Premieres Wed 28 Oct
Your Jaw Is Broken
Premieres Wed 21 Oct
The Surgeon Who Rebuilt the Broken Faces of WWI
Premieres Wed 14 Oct
A Toothache Could Kill You
Leonardo da Vinci and the Bone That Brought Down Galen
George Washington's Teeth: They Weren't Wood
Why a Dentist Pulled His Own Tooth on Laughing Gas
They Pushed Needles Into Dead Faces to Find Bach
→See every episode
Our promise
Real stories from court records and archives. Real science, written by an oral & maxillofacial surgeon. No fake gore, no fake facts — and sources you can check on every page.
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